In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. Today, we discuss the X-Men and why it was miraculous that it made it to the big screen at all.

Today, the X-Men franchise is one of the biggest properties both in comics and in film. But it wasn’t always this way. As a matter of fact, the X-Men were almost a forgotten concept by 1973, just ten years after their creation.

The team were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, and arrived on newsstands the same month that Marvel debuted The Avengers. Stan Lee claims that he came up with genetic mutation for the source of their powers because he simply didn’t want to think up another reason for their origin. If this is the case, Lee is an accidental genius. The fact that the heroes of the X-Men had to hid who they really are for fear of being shunned or ridiculed tapped a vein for readers who could easily relate, be they part of the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, or just plain, old, everyday teenagers. Lee’s choice of an origin for the X-Men opened up an audience for the characters that they wouldn’t have had if they gained their powers through a spider bite or nuclear accident.

But even though the X-men had a built in audience, it took a long time for that audience to find the book. Almost from the very beginning, the book floundered. Kirby left after issue #11, leaving the art in the hands of the rather underwhelming Werner Roth. Lee left after issue #19, turning over writing duties to Roy Thomas. The team kept the same staid yellow and blue costumes until issue #39. While the Fantastic Four was facing off against legendary villains such as Galactus and Annihilus and the Avengers were squaring off with Ultron and Kang, the X-Men’s rogue gallery featured such boring entries as the alien Lucifer, Locust, El Tigre and Eric the Red.

The title was in such dire straits that even the addition of superstar artist Neal Adams in 1969 for a seven issue run couldn’t save it from being cancelled. The X-Men went on hiatus with issue #66. It would return eight months later, but only as a bi-monthly reprint title.

It remained that way until April of 1975 when Giant-Size X-Men #1 came out. Len Wein and Dave Cockrum, working from an idea contributed by former writer Roy Thomas, did a total overhaul of the X-Men. Gone was the chummy, schoolyard camaraderie of the previous team. The “All-New, All-Different” X-men were an international team of adults, each with more issues than National Geographic Magazine. You had pre-existing X-Men villains in the relatively laid back Irishman Banshee and the haughty and arrogant Japanese Sunfire. You had new characters such as the African Storm, who was accustomed to being worshiped as a goddess, and the Native American Thunderbird, the one with a chip constantly on his shoulder. By comparison, two other new characters that should have been reviled became the most identifiable. The German Nightcrawler looked like a demon from the pits of Hell, complete with a pointy tail, yet was playful and gregarious (and also a devout Catholic). And it would have been easy to make the Russian character the least popular one on the team, since it was the heart of the Cold War. But Colossus was a simple farmer with skin of steel and a heart of gold, who was more concerned with painting pretty pictures than spewing Communist Party rhetoric.

And the last member of the group? A minor character Wein created several months before in the pages of Incredible Hulk. A diminutive Canadian named Wolverine.

This was not the X-Men team you read when you were a child. And when Thunderbird became the first member of the team to die in action six months later in issue #95 of the restarted X-Men series, it became clear anything could happen.

Wein eventually made way for Chris Claremont as writer, and Claremont’s writing brought new fans in. Claremont took the team from a bunch of combative character flaws to a group of noble souls with their own vulnerabilities and quirks. He humanized the mutantsand played up the “oppressed minority” aspect more than it ever hd been, tasks that went even farther once Claremont was joined by John Byrne as penciller and co-plotter a year and a half later. Claremont and Byrne had an explosive synergy, quickly becoming one of the most renown creative teams in comics, creating such legendary story arcs as the Hellfire Saga (briefly touched on in X-Men: First Class), the Dark Phoenix Saga (which became part of X-Men: The Last Stand‘s plot) and Days of Future Past (which inspired the forthcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past).

By the time Byrne left the book in December 1980, the X-Men were well on their way to becoming the most successful book Marvel published. It would spawn numerous spin-off titles, quite a few crossover events, and help launch the careers of artists such as Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri. And with that success came some attention from Hollywood. As early as 1984, Hollywood had plans to make an X-Men film, which would have made it the Marvel’s earliest entry onto the silver screen.

Roy Thomas and fellow comic book scribe Gerry Conway were hired to write the screenplay for a potential X-Men film for Orion Films. Their film features a different take on X-Men comic book villain Proteus as the main bad guy (instead of a reality warping mutant, it was an organization ran by a vampire-like mutant named Stonewall). The word mutant is never used in the script. The team consisted of Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, an ambulatory Professor Xavier, Cyclops, Kitty Pryde, and a Japanese pop star named Circe who can transmute matter. Orion entered financial difficulties soon after the script was written, and had the back out of the project. Conway and Thomas’ script was shopped around, but with no takers.

Five years later, Stan Lee, Chris Claremont and James Cameron were in negotiations with Carolco Pictures in order to get an X-Men film made. Once again, the studio’s insolvency cause the X-Men film to be dropped. Cameron went on to focus his attention on getting a Spider-Man film made, which we’ll talk about a bit later.

It seemed like the X-Men film was cursed to go to one financially plagued studio to another, yet never being made. But the property’s success in the world of Saturday morning cartoons caused a major studio to take interest. We’ll discuss that next time.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. Today, we examine why original superheroes are the best choice for film comedies.

If the Batman TV series taught us anything, adapting a comic book in a humorous way is a dicey prospect. Comic book fans still wince whenever that series is mentioned because it dared to make a joke out of Batman in particular and comic books in general. We comic book aficionados are pretty sensitive when it comes to people not taking the medium we consider sacrosanct seriously.  We don’t want Jack Black playing Green Lantern. We don’t want Bat Credit Cards. And while we don’t mind humor where humor is appropriate (see The Avengers), we don’t want Hollywood to create a comedy out of something that was never intended to be funny.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of tropes and trademarks in comic books that lend themselves to comedy or parody. That’s where original heroes come in. When filmmakers use original concepts to point out the humor inherent in comic book conventions, not many comic fans get up in arms. If the film is good or bad, a hit or a flop, it doesn’t mean one of their beloved comic book properties is affected in any way.  And the hit to flop ratio typically favors the flop side of the equation with a lot of these comedies.

1994’s Blankman was a parody that took skewered look at the science-based superhero origin. Like Batman, Blankman lost a loved one to violent crime (his grandmother). He, like Batman and also Iron Man, is a technical genius with a skill for building gadgets and gizmos. However, unlike those heroes, he is not a suave millionaire who lives in a mansion, but rather a socially inept appliance repairman who lives in a crime-riddled inner city neighborhood. He doesn’t have hi-tech Batarangs, he has a boot on a stick attached to some rope. He doesn’t have a computerized suit of armor, he has a robot sidekick named J-5 he jury-rigged out of an old washing machine.

While there is humor in the concept and one part of the ads did make me chuckle (the part where Blankman telling his brother/sidekick that he is certain J-5 will come rescue them, then quickly cuts to the awkward robot unsuccessfully negotiating a flight of stairs, sure to be reduced to a pile of gears at the landing below), I have to admit that I never saw this film. Damon Wayans, who co-wrote the movie with J. F. Lawton, plays Blankman in the manner of a more ribald Jerry Lewis. Blankman was more supergeek than superhero, and in the most annoying way possible.

The horrible ex-boy/girlfriend is a film staple, in both comedies and dramas. There is a lot of humor to be mined from a relationship gone wrong, a reminder of a mistake that you made or a messy break up that you repeatedly have to pay for.  But what if your ex was a superhero? What if the aftermath of your break up comes with collateral damage and if your jilted ex-girlfriend says she will kill you, it’s well within her power to do so.

That’s the concept behind 2006’s My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Luke Wilson plays Matt, a man who enters a relationship with a woman named Jenny Johnson (Uma Thurman) after rescuing her purse from a purse-snatcher.  It doesn’t take long before Matt realizes that dating the possessive, clingy and passive aggressive Jenny was a mistake, and he breaks up with her. Big mistake, as Jenny is a crimefighter named G-Girl who has Superman-esque powers, a quick temper, and little or no impulse control. Jenny soon decides to devote every second she is not saving the world to making Matt’s life a living hell.

Your enjoyment of this film would probably depend on how willing you were to overlook the fact that Thurman’s character is composed of the worst qualities of every bad girlfriend stereotype there is. Thurman does do her best to try to make a real human being out of the bundle of neuroses, insecurities, and rage, but even at 95 minutes it gets to be too much. Jenny is less a woman scorned and more a shrewish harridan, and the film would have been much better if she was the former.

Not that it mattered. The film doubled its budget in worldwide grosses, so it might have not been that big of a flop in the long run. Its mixed reaction from the critics didn’t keep people away, although it didn’t do quite as well as our next film, which overcame mixed reviews two years later to earn over $624 million dollars worldwide at the box office.

Hancock was once a dark and gritty look at a Superman-like hero who balances his obligation to protect humanity with giving in to his basest instincts—watching porn, alcohol, the whole nine yards. That was when it was called Tonight, He Comes and before it went through the development hell that left us with the neutered result that made it to theaters. In Vincent Ngo’s original script, Hancock was a character that made Billy Bob Thornton’s character in Bad Santa look like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.  The original Hancock was a cop-killer and an attempted rapist, not the kind of character you’d expect Will Smith to play. As a matter of fact, it took even more creative editing to keep the watered down version from getting an R rating.

A miniscule amount of Ngo’s Hancock remains. The character is now a self-loathing, amnesiatic alcoholic whose superheroic deeds often come with multi-million dollar property damage. He is pretty much hated by the whole city of Los Angeles, and the city wants a word with him about all the damage he causes. A chance to improve his image comes when he saves the life of Ray (Jason Bateman), a public relations guru who offers work to improve his negative standing in the community as a sign of gratitude.

Being a comedy up to this point, logic dictates that the story should follow Hancock’s path to redemption.  Maybe a couple of positive PR opportunities Hancock screws up either through fate or his own arrogance. Perhaps a few dark secrets from Hancock’s past that Ray would have to deal with. But it would all lead to Hancock facing off against a threat that is a danger to his city and/or world, a threat he has no chance in overcoming, but he faces it anyway to save lives of the people that hate him. He is eventually victorious—at a cost—but ends up winning over the people who once hated him.

Predicatable, yes, and I am anything but a professional Hollywood screenwriter, but that would be better than what we actually received—a turgid 90 degree turn into melodrama.

Ray introduces Hancock to his wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), who, surprise, also has superpowers! Not only that, but comes from the same race of immortals that Hancock does! But wait, it gets better! It turns out that Mary is actually Hancock’s “wife.” Yes, she and Hancock are star-crossed lovers who must remain separate in order to save their lives. Because whenever they get near each other, they lose their invulnerability! That’s why Hancock has amnesia, because he was jumped by a racist in 1928 for daring to be seen in public by his white wife Mary (She left him so his powers would come back and he could heal. Although it seems he didn’t heal completely)!  Now, both of their lives are in danger!

I have no idea why Vince Gilligan, John August and whoever else reworked Ngo’s script tacked on this ending. Maybe they thought it would help humanize Hancock as a character. Or add a bit of social commentary into the mix. Or maybe they sincerely thought the new ending was great. They were wrong on all aspects. No plot points in the second half of the film are properly developed (especially the “becoming vulnerable while being close together” plot point. Don’t get me started on that one).  The second half has a tenuous connection to the first half of the film. So much so, that it’s like Hancock is two separate films awkwardly stitched together, with a garish piece of duct tape put over the seam to keep it together. Hancock could have been a better film, even if they didn’t follow Ngo’s original script to the letter. But as it stands, it is a disappointment. Well to me at least, it has done well enough to earn a sequel, that has been in the works for years.

Speaking of films that are stitched together from other films, let’s talk about Superhero Movie, a 2008 film that parodied the superhero genre.

The film uses Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man as the framework to hang their parody on. It focuses on Rick Riker (Drake Bell) who gains superpowers after being bitten by a genetically altered Dragonfly. He soon comes into conflict with Hourglass (Christopher McDonald), an industrialist who can siphon the life force from other humans to use to make himself stronger.

The film is a step above the typical modern-day parodies such as Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie (not that it’s a high bar to leap over) due to the involvement of Airplane’s David Zucker as a producer and the parody being based around an actual plot. But it pales in comparison to Zucker’s other parodies Airplane, Top Secret and Naked Gun.

If there is an “auteur” of the non-comic book superhero comedies, it is James Gunn. He has been involved in two films that employ a darkly comic look into the superhero archetype in a realistic setting, albeit in two very opposite ends of the spectrum.

In 2000, Gunn wrote The Specials, a film (directed by Superhero Movie’s Craig Mazin)which paints a more corporate world where superheroes are judged less by their abilities that their marketability.

In the film, the Specials are a lower tier super group. They get to fight the crappy villains, they get no movies made about them, and the only toy company who will make dolls of them doesn’t care enough about them to get their costumes, or even their genders, right. On the day their toy line is introduced, the team’s leader, The Strobe (Thomas Hayden Church) finds out his wife/teammate, Ms. Indestructable (Paget Brewster) is having an affair with the group’s most popular member, The Weevil (Rob Lowe). This causes the team to break up right on the cusp of their greatest (by default) achievement.

The film has a pretty good cast for its budget (@ $1 million). Gunn has a role in the film himself as The Strobe’s brother, Minute Man. The film had a brief life in the theaters before moving on to home video.

The Specials might be a cynical look at what the real world might really have to offer a superhero, but it was a cheery Saturday morning cartoon compared to Gunn’s 2010 film, Super, which Gunn wrote and directed.

Super is by far much darker than The Specials, as the black comedy is filled with a world people caught up in the spiral of drug addiction, female on male rape, and where deaths happen in a quick and gruesome fashion. If Gunn has one skill, it would be his ability to get great actors to work with him—at scale no less. This film features Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Kevin Bacon, Liv Tyler, Michael Rooker and Nathan Fillion in its cast. That’s a line up any director would love to have, and the cast raises Gunn’s film to a higher level.

Gunn, of course, is set to direct Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. I am curious to see if Marvel lets him apply his cynical black humor to the property.

Finally, we have Defendor, a film similarly themed and similar in tone to Super.

The 2009 film is a twisted take on the Batman mythos (and also that of Rorschach of the Watchmen). When he was a kid, Arthur’s mother died after an extended period of drug abuse and prostitution. Arthur’s grandfather blamed his daughter’s death on the “captains of industry,” meaning that a society that favors the rich forced his economically poor daughter into her downward spiral. Young Arthur mistook his grandfather and thought he was saying one person, named Captain Industry, killed his mother. Arthur turned that a lifelong quest to bring his mother’s”killer” to justice through vigilantism.

Aided by a strong lead performance by Woody Harrelson, and with a underrated cast that featured Kat Dennings, Sandra Oh and Elias Koteas, the film did fairly well with critics. However, problems with U.S. distributor Sony caused the film to have only a limited theatrical release in the States.

Next, we finally get back into covering films actually adapted from comic books with a look at everyone’s favorite mutants.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll talk about the third of three of the best “superhero” film franchises that only appeared in comics after the films were released. 

If you were like me, you were pretty excited at the end of The Matrix.

As a refresher for those of you that saw it (and if you haven’t, well, consider this your spoiler warning), the film ends with our main protagonist, Neo (Keanu Reeves) speaking on the telephone. Neo has just gone through a journey of discovery and growth. See, the world in which Neo lives isn’t really real. It’s a mass hallucination implanted in humanity’s head by machines, which use human beings as their power source.  Neo was supposed to be the savior of the human race, one who could train his mind both consciously and subconsciously to see the manufactured reality, which is called the Matrix, for what it was, to shape it for his own purposes, and to beat the machines at their own game. During the climactic scene of the film, Neo lives up to his potential, overcoming even death in the computer created world. Neo had become essentially invulnerable and incredibly powerful.

Let’s get back to the phone call. Neo ends the film by speaking into the telephone that he will show the rest of humanity that is trapped in the Matrix that anything is possible. He then hangs up, steps out of the phone booth, and flies into the air and off into the sunset.

As a comic book fan, I was pretty psyched about this ending. If Darkman, which we covered last time, could be seen as an off-brand Batman, The Matrix franchise was setting itself up as an off-brand Superman, with Neo in the role of the Man of Steel, fighting a cyberpunk reimagining of Brainiac in the machines. There’s even the similar Christ metaphor between the two.

This theorem might seem to be a stretch, but is it really? During the struggle to get Superman back on the big screen, constant effort was made to make that franchise more like The Matrix, right down to replacing Supes’ trademark costume with something black and Neo-like.

But this was all misplaced expectations. The Matrix sequels didn’t really go in the way I, or anybody expected.

You can write a whole series of blog posts on the many things that went in to influence The Matrix. People have seen everything from the major world religions to the writings of Jean Baudrillard to an episode of Doctor Who in the franchise. But one undeniable influence has to be the world of comic books, especially the worlds of manga and anime. Akira was the inspiration for the “bullet time” effects the films made famous. Ghost in the Shell was used to pitch the movie and provided the template to its overall style. The Wachowski siblings, the creative force behind the franchise, are comic book fans and wrote comics for Marvel’s Epic imprint before their writing ever appeared on movie screens. And comic book artists Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce worked as concept and storyboard artists on the film.

These are the comic book inspirations that are admitted to. However, in a 2005 interview that ran on the Suicide Girl’s website, Grant Morrison claimed that The Matrix was “plot by plot, detail by detail, image by image” copied from his Invisibles miniseries, the first issue of which was released five years before the movie opened.

Regardless if whether the comic book influence was admitted to or denied, The Matrix was a comic book film without being based on a comic book. It captured the complexities and layers found in the comic books of the day and put them on screen in such a way that audiences could easily digest them. And, to further cement the comic book/film bond, the Wachowskis published tie-in graphic novels after the first film became a success.

I’d argue that the Wachowskis never expected there to be a demand for a second or third Matrix film. My evidence comes from one of the big battles featuring Neo in The Matrix Reloaded, I believe it was the one where he fought the Merovingian’s lackeys.

During the course of the battle, Neo bleeds. This upset me to no end. Not because it would not become the Superman allegory that I wished for, but because it showed some shoddy writing. After the end of the last movie where Neo actually overcame death, nothing, but nothing should make him bleed. But bleed he did. I understand the logic—you want your audience to worry about the protagonists, having the life and death situations they face in the film truly be life and death. But in this case, it was backsliding. It was as if the Wachowskis couldn’t figure out how to keep the audience interested in a superhuman hero, so they back stepped and made him more human.

After that, I was pretty much done with the film. Forget the fact that the human survivors’ first reaction when faced with impending robot doom was to throw a sexually charged rave or that the climax essentially boiled down to Neo talking to an old guy in a room. Nothing the creators could have done would have been worse than weakening Neo in my eyes. The Matrix Revolutions wasn’t a grand finale to me but rather a putting the franchise out of its misery coda.

The fact that The Matrix was so perfect made the entire franchise such a disappointment. What was crisp and new became turgid and hackneyed. That is truly a shame.

Next up, we’ll cover a trio of original superhero movies that play with film genres to get their points across.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll talk about the first three of the best “superhero” films that only appeared in comics after the films were released. 

Fair warning, you might have issue with these three film franchises being covered in the next three installments being called “superhero” movies. I’m here to make the case they are. But even if you don’t buy my argument, you have to admit the connection between these films and the world of comics is a tangible one.

These franchises have a lot in common. Each received life in comics after its first film opened, and the world of comics played a part in their creation to some extent. Each franchise was started by directors whose talent made them the biggest names in the film world. And each franchise was a case of diminishing returns after the big splash made by the first installment.

Some might ask, “Why is RoboCop on the list and the other famous Orion release of the ’80s, The Terminator, not? Couldn’t that film be considered an unofficial comic book film?” Yes, it could. But the ties between RoboCop and comics are a little bit stronger.

Director Paul Verhoeven has admitted in a 2002 interview with Dutch website XI Online that RoboCop, Verhoeven’s first major American film, was inspired by British comic book character, Judge Dredd, and you can see it, too. RoboCop takes place in a similar dystopian near-future as Dredd, is offered as the last word in law enforcement like Dredd, and often acts as judge, jury and executioner, too, like Dredd. But I don’t think the comic book inspirations end there.

In 1974, Marvel Comics came up with a character called Deathlok. He was a soldier named Luther Manning from a dystopian future version of Detroit, Michigan who is fatally injured in battle. Before he dies, his body is retrieved and what can be saved is rebuilt into a cyborg by an evil corporation with the intent of using the man-machine to work towards their interests. He eventually gains independence and fights against his programming. RoboCop is Alex Murphy, a police officer in a dystopian future version of Detroit, Michigan who is fatally injured in the line of duty. Before he dies, his body is retrieved and what can be saved is rebuilt into a cyborg by an evil corporation with the intent of using the man-machine to work towards their interests. He eventually gains independence and fights against his programming.

Now, this could be a big coincidence, but if the powers that be were inspired by a comic with limited exposure in the U.S. at the time, they could have very well been familiar with the rather obscure Deathlok. Nothing has been said officially if Deathlok inspired RoboCop, so this is all speculation. But it is worth thinking about.

Regardless of the inspiration, RoboCop was an awesome film, well ahead of its time. On one level, it works as a great futuristic sci-fi action film. On another level, it is a cutting piece of satire of the era that still rings true today. Some of the jabs are obvious—television, commercials and the need for consumer products, others are more subtle—the jingoism of Regan’s America, the corporatization of public services, and violence in film (satire which was lost on the MPAA, who made director Verhoeven tone down the violence in order to avoid an X Rating, and many audience members).

The film was well received critically and financially, which means sequels. But director Verhoeven and writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner would not be returning for RoboCop 2.

But this did not seem like much of a problem. To replace Verhoeven, the powers that be chose Irvin Kershner. It might be a stylistic step down, but Kershner did direct The Empire Strikes Back, the much lauded second installment in the Star Wars franchise. For writing, they turned to the world of comics. They looked towards a name that was getting a lot of attention for a series that covered a lot of the same themes as RoboCop. The book was The Dark Knight Returns and the writer was Frank Miller.

On paper, this seemed like a project that while not being as good as the original, it would be good in its own right. However, on film, 1990’s RoboCop 2 was a resounding disappointment.

Judging by how bad his writing would eventually become, it would be easy to blame Frank Miller for how bad these sequels turned out. However, Miller has stated that the producers rewrote his script to an absurd level and what was on the screen only had traces of what he originally wrote.  His original script was adapted into comic book form in 2003 by Avatar Press.  It proved that he was right. Oh, Miller’s version was bad, just bad in a different way, but practically the only thing that remained the same in both versions was the introduction of a new cyborg officer (named…RoboCop 2! Hilarity!) and an even more war-torn Detroit.

Where Miller’s version and the version that made it to the screen went wrong was that both failed to grasp what made the original so great. Instead of uberviolence that pointed out the absurdity of movie violence, it was the type of gratuitous violence the first film mocked. Instead of biting satire, it was ham-fisted mockery of easy pop culture targets. Instead of shocking us with the depravity that humans can stoop to, it gives us a twelve-year-old drug lord and expects us to be shocked.

Miller did get something out of it. He was able to visit the set everyday to learn the art of filmmaking. He also garnered the first of what would be a string of cameos in feature films.

While the film was a critical failure, it made enough money to garner another sequel. Miller was brought back to write RoboCop 3, and he accepted the job thinking this time would be different and he would finally be able to reintroduce plot points that were removed from his script for RoboCop 2. He was wrong. While some elements Miller wanted made their way in—the forcible relocation of Old Detroit residents, the use of mercenaries to supplement the Detroit police force—his script was changed even more this time around, due to the way the character morphed through in his appearances in other media.

After the success of the first RoboCop, the franchise branched out into other medium. It became a Marvel comic book which presented a more kid friendly version of the character and ran from 1990-1993. Marvel, through its Marvel Productions arm, also produced a syndicated cartoon in 1988 which, while darker than the other cartoon fare of the time, was considerably less violent and gory than the film. The property also made its way into the world of video games, again with much of its content toned down.

The result was that the RoboCop brand became, well, more kid friendly. The producers of the film franchise recognized this and decided to make RoboCop 3 a more kid-accessible PG-13.

Peter Weller, who was excellent in the role of RoboCop, is gone for this installment, replaced by Robert John Burke. Nancy Allen stayed for a few scenes before getting herself killed off. The violence was toned down and kid-friendly plot elements such as a jet pack for RoboCop and robo-ninjas as his enemies put the final nail in removing all traces of what made the first film great.

There has been a remake in the works since 2005. Director Darren Aronofsky was briefly attached to the project before Jose Padilha was chosen to take over the reins. This should be coming out later in the year that this post will run, so I’ll just have to add to it as time goes by.

Next up, Sam Raimi examines the superhero archetype years before he directed Spider-Man.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll talk about superhero films not adapted from any comic book.  

Not every movie starring a superhero is adapted from a comic book but each has been inspired by or in turn inspired comic books.  Many of these non-comic book comic book films have sprung up in recent years but they have been appearing in movie theaters for over thirty years. We will dedicate the next few installments to these movies. We’ll try to talk about all of them here, but odds are one or two will slip our notice. Let us know what you think we’ve missed and maybe we’ll include them in a future installment.

One of my most fondly remembered superhero movies was 1980’s Hero At Large.

John Ritter stars as Steve Nichols, an underemployed actor who is hired to portray the character Captain Avenger at the opening of a film based on the character. A job that entailed just signing autographs for fans becomes something more when Nichols breaks up a robbery while in costume. The media grabs hold of it, and his life becomes much more complicated. Nichols is compelled to keep fighting crime as Captain Avenger while political interests want to use Nichols for their own interests.

I haven’t seen the film in a while, but it was one of my favorites as a youth. It wasn’t Hamlet, but it wasn’t awful either. Anne Archer, passed over several years prior for Lois Lane in Superman, gets to play a similar part here as Nichols’ neighbor/love interest. Kevin Bacon has a small part in the film as well.

The film made $15,934,737 at the box office that year. That might seem paltry by today’s standards, but it out grossed other, better well known films from that year such as Prom Night, Used Cars, Stardust Memories and Mad Max.

A year later, Disney came out with its take on the superhero, Condorman.

Hero At Large might have been cheesy, but it was nothing compared to this film. Condorman couldn’t have been cheesier if it was paired with a beef stick and sold at a Hickory Farms kiosk over the holidays. The film has been all but consigned to the dustbin of history by most (the above trailer was put together by a fan), those that do remember it recall it fondly in a “so-bad-it’s-good” sort of way.   Michael Crawford, five years before he would take the stage as the Phantom in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production of Phantom of the Opera, stars as Woody Wilkins, a comic book writer of a character called “Condorman” who is pulled into a spy exchange in Europe. Wilkins adopts the Condorman identity, becomes a spy for the CIA, and rescues a Russian double agent played by Barbara Carrera.

In all fairness, the film is more a Disneyfied version of the James Bond-esque spy thriller than an actual comic book, although Crawford does appear in costume as Condorman and uses many Batman-esque gizmos and gadgets. It goes without saying that the film was a critical and commercial flop.

While Condorman probably began with the noblest intentions and wound up at cheesiness accidentally, The Toxic Avenger wallowed in its inherent cheesiness to the fullest extent from the very first day of production, as is the trademark of the studio that released it, Troma Entertainment.

Whether it was intended to be or not, 1984’s The Toxic Avenger was like all of the Marvel Comics from the 1960s brought to the big screen all wrapped up in one. Toxie, as he is lovingly referred to, starts the film as a nerdy janitor bullied by his peers (much like Peter Parker was before he became Spider-Man). One day, he has an accidental exposure to radioactive materials (like, well, take your pick: Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Daredevil, any number of other heroes and villains from Marvel at that time) which causes the nebbish to grow into a superhumanly strong creature (like The Hulk). He uses his new power to fight crime in Tromaville, finding love along the way with a blind woman who loves him for who he is and not what he looks like (mimicking a plot point featuring the Fantastic Four’s Thing and blind sculptress Alicia Masters).

What separated the film from the Marvel Comics of the 1960s was the schlocky, off-center and off-color humor, the violence that was so graphic that it became absurd, and the copious amounts of sex and nudity that is the trademark of the Troma film. But the first film was a success and that spawned a sequel, 1989’s The Toxic Avenger Part II:

When Troma found they shot enough footage for two films, they released another sequel in 1989, The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie:

And yet another sequel, 2000’s Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV:

That last film pulled out all the stops when it came to celebrity cameos, featuring Ron Jeremy, Corey Feldman, Hugh Hefner, and Julie Strain, with Stan Lee serving as narrator.

The Toxic Avenger was also adapted into a short-lived Marvel comic book in 1991 and a stage musical in 2008. A rumored fourth sequel was planned, but might have made way for a PG-13 remake produced by Akiva Goldsman and directed by Hot Tub Time Machine’s Steve Pink.

The next film we are going to discuss was made with noble intentions but became a box office failure. Hollywood Shuffle’s Robert Townsend wanted to make a film that was a counter-point to the popular “gangsta” films such as New Jack City and Juice that dominated cineplexes at the time. So, in 1993, he came up with a film idea that presented a positive black role model that would work to stop black-on-black violence instead of glorify it. That film was The Meteor Man.

The film told the story of Jefferson Reed, a Washington, DC teacher who is struck by a meteor and given superpowers. He uses these powers to clean up his neighborhood—stopping gang violence, demolishing crack houses, and stopping robberies. While the Toxic Avenger was a mix of a bunch of Marvel superheroes, the Meteor Man seemed to borrow from a number of DC Comics heroes, most notably Superman (who shares most of the same powers and the “mom-made costume” bit) and Black Lightning (DC’s first major black superhero, who was also a teacher named Jefferson Pierce).

The film featured a veritable who’s who of the best African-American actors America had to offer, including Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones, and Robert Guillaume and did earnestly try to present a more positive African-American role model.  But the film was rather simplistic and the naive (the two gangs in the film, the Bloods and the Crips, put aside their differences to support Meteor Man in his fight against the white drug lord) script led to box-office disappointment.

Next time, we cover three popular movies that might stretch the definition of the superhero, but that had an effect on comic books for years to come.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll continue to talk about the world of alternative comics and the impression they made on movie screens.

To call American Splendor the Seinfeld of comic books would do a disservice to both the comic book and the sitcom.  True, both dealt with the mundane events of everyday life—were about “nothing” if you will—but each approached it from different angles. Jerry Seinfeld’s self-named sitcom featured exaggerated parodies of himself and his friends pointing out the foibles of everyday life and human nature, often through extreme situations. Harvey Pekar’s comic book was a slice of his life told in a compelling way without having to resort to exaggeration or aggrandizement. It was simply him relating his everyday life—him going to work, paying bills, and dealing with health issues.

The comics were published by Pekar himself, but his partnership with legendary underground cartoonist Robert Crumb led to Pekar’s work gaining a bigger audience, notable collaborators such as Alison Bechdel, Spain Rodriguez, Drew Friedman and Joe Sacco, and mainstream attention in the form of him becoming a regular guest on Late Night With David Letterman. The film American Splendor was less an adaptation of any particular issue of the comic book, than telling of Pekar’s rise to fame. The film was audacious by conventional film standards. Directed by documentarians Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini with Paul Giamatti doing a masterful acting job of portraying Pekar, it mixed Pekar’s life story with animation and with documentary cut-ins featuring the real-life Pekar commenting on what was going on in the movie. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and Springer Berman and Pulcini garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Giamatti was criminally snubbed for his work, one of many to come in the actor’s career.

Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes reunited in 2006 to bring another one of Clowes’ stories to the big screen, Art School Confidential, which originally appeared in Eightball #7. While the original comic story was only four pages long, it was chock full of scathing observations about the institution of art school, from the failed artists that make up the teaching staff, the pretentious students that take classes there, and the ultimate fact that success at school has no bearing on being a successful artist post-school.

The comic story packs pertinent observations into those four pages, but that is all it does. There is no narrative, no protagonist, and no conflict. The story was just panel after panel of art school tropes that Clowes could puncture with his wit for their hypocrisy. So, for the film, Clowes added a protagonist—a freshman art college student by the name of Jerome (Max Minghella)—to act as a lens for further examination/deconstruction of art school life and what seems like a tacked on murder mystery subplot.

The film was a commercial ($3.3 million worldwide gross versus a $5 million budget) and critical (only 36% Fresh at Rotten Tomatoes) flop. I liked the film, but I had the good fortune to see it with someone who was an art major in college. It was much more enjoyable to see how close Clowes’ and Zwigoff’s satire cut to the bone.

The Scott Pilgrim series was the closest thing comics had to the Harry Potter novels. Each installment was a self-contained story that played part in a larger, finite epic, each installment was eagerly anticipated by its loyal fan bases, and was talked about endlessly by said fans during its duration.

Many people, including the comic’s author Bryan Lee O’Malley, were surprised by Scott Pilgrim’s popularity, but, looking back, it wasn’t very hard to see why it became popular. The series was an amalgamation of a number of cult cultures—video games, manga, indie/bar bands, superheroes, etc—combined into an epic romance. It had something for just about every audience that buys comic books. Taking this into consideration, it was no wonder that the series would be adapted for the big screen.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World might take its name from the second volume of O’Malley’s six-volume epic, but it manages to adapt all six books into one film. To purists, this might seem outrageous. After all, it took eight films to adapt the Harry Potter series onto the big screen.  But in the expert hands of Edgar Wright, the film, in my opinion, became even better than the comic books.

Wright and co-screenwriter Michael Bacall were able to cut just enough from the volumes to keep the plot moving without ever losing the feel and themes of the original story. Certain installments of the graphic novel, especially volume three, felt a bit padded. Wright and Bacall did a great job of tightening up the narrative to keep the film motoring along at a great pace.

Add to that Wright’s masterful directing, which melded live-action versions of O’Malley’s kinetic visuals with his own unique style, and you have one of the best comic book adaptations to come down the pike. However, the film was a box office disappointment ($47 million worldwide against a $60 million cost) which I lay at the hands of piss poor marketing on the part of Universal. I am holding out hope that the film eventually becomes a cult favorite with future generations, because it really deserves a long life in the pop culture consciousness.

Next, we take a break from covering comic book adaptations and take an extended look at what happens when Hollywood tries to come up with its own superhero properties.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll talk about how the world of alternative comics made their way to the movie screen.

Much like as it was in music at the time, the 1980s marked the dawn of the alternative comic. Drawn from the underground comix of the 60s and 70s, but with a more literate and artistic temperament, alternative comics provided an alternative to the superhero dominated comic books that ruled the comic shops and newsstands. The output ran the gamut to the art comics such as Art Spiegelman’s RAW—where his Pulitzer Prize winning examination of the Holocaust, Maus, first appeared, the parody turned social satire of Dave Sim’s Cerebus, to sword-and-sorcery themed Elfquest by Richard and Wendy Pini and Bob Burden’s esoteric parody of the superhero, Flaming Carrot.

It was in Flaming Carrot Comics where the Mystery Men first appeared. The character Flaming Carrot, created by Bob Burden, is hard to describe. He is a rough and tumble urban vigilante whose costume is a dress shirt, a pair of slacks, green flippers, and a giant carrot with flames instead of stalks for a mask. He’s like Batman, only instead of a Batarang, Flaming Carrot has a baloney gun, and instead of the Batmobile he has a nuclear powered pogo stick.

The character and the comics he appeared in were a surrealistic parody of comic book tropes and into this world in 1987 came the Mystery Men. They were Burden’s surrealistic take on the superhero team, and 12 years later, they were brought to the big screen.

You could say that Mystery Men was ahead of its time. It came at the very beginning of the superhero movie trend, when the time wasn’t exactly right for parody. If it arrived five years later, it would probably have been better received. I thought of it as a pretty funny film. It had an all-star cast that ranged from Ben Stiller to William H. Macy to Greg Kinnear. Its tone was less esoteric than the comic it was adapted from, but it was still dark, unique and quirky comedy. It was greatly underrated.

The next indie comic book that was brought to the big screen was adapted from a miniseries that was never completed. Dark Town was created by writer Kaja Blackley and artist Vanessa Chong and detailed the adventures of a man who falls into a coma after a car accident and enters an alternate reality filled with talking puppets. He, armed with only his imagination, must climb out of this strange land before his body dies. There was only one issue published of the series, but that was enough for it to be optioned for a movie. That movie would be 2001’s Monkeybone.

On paper, Monkeybone had a lot going for it. It was produced by Chris Columbus, the man who would bring Harry Potter to the big screen that very same year. It was written by Sam Hamm, a comic-friendly writer most famous for the first Batman film. And it was directed by Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. That was a pretty good pedigree to have.

Perhaps they were hampered by having an incomplete story to work with. Or maybe the way they altered the original concept to fit the ending they wrote  for the story. But the film that came as a result was a chaotic mess.

The main character was still sent to a surreal mindscape as a result of a grievous head injury. But he was now changed to being a cartoonist named Stu Miley and the landscape was one influenced by his most famous creation, Monkeybone. The plot involves the Stu’s attempt to escape the fantasy world he was trapped in and recover his body from Monkeybone, who took his place in the land of the living.

The film was an example of forced wackiness. Being wacky on film is not easy to do. The Marx Brothers were masters of cinematic wackiness, because it was effortless for them. When you force the issue, when you try too hard to be wacky, typically you fail miserably. That’s what happened here.

Another creator with a penchant for surrealistic satire is Daniel Clowes. One of the biggest “superstars” of the indie comics scene, Clowes became an ipso facto voice of Generation X through works such as the Lloyd Llewellen miniseries and his anthology Eightball. His work captured the ennui that generation felt and was filled with characters with as many bad qualities as they had good ones to whom boredom was their greatest enemy.

Ghost World, directed by Terry Zwigoff and co-written by Zwigoff and Clowes himself from his 1997 graphic serial, captures the tone of the original work to a T. The film starred Thora Birch and a young Scarlet Johansson as two teenage outsiders in search of a sense of belonging in their small suburban town.

The pair garnered an Oscar nomination for their work on the script. The film was a modest success, which encouraged the pair to adapt another one of Clowes stories to the big screen. We’ll cover that film next time, along with two of the biggest and most iconic indie properties to be adapted to the big screen.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll talk about how Blade was the true start of Marvel’s dominance of the comic book film.

One way to look at it, he could be the answer to “What if Shaft hunted vampires?” Or it could have very well been a counterpoint to Blacula, which hit theaters the year before. You can make any theory you want, but it seems like Blade’s first appearance in 1973’s Tomb of Dracula #10 played off the popular Blaxploitation trend of the day. It is ironic that a character inspired by a film genre would be the adaptation that would jump-start Marvel’s mastery of the film box office.

The comic book Blade was created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan to be an adversary of Dracula. He was the son of a woman who was attacked by a vampire while giving birth to Blade. This bite passed on certain abilities to Blade, such as not being susceptible to vampires yet being attuned to their genetic makeup, therefore able to track them. Other than that, he was a highly-trained martial artist and fighter with no superpowers.

Before the film came out, Blade typically made only a supporting character in other character’s books, only having one, ten-issue series to his name. Not really the first character you’d expect to be made into a movie, considering Marvel’s most popular titles (X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four) either were stuck in development Hell or adapted with less than stellar results.

But Blade being the first of this new era of Marvel Comics films was probably the best thing to happen to the genre. Being that the character was so low on the totem pole, there were less preconceived notions about the concept, and, therefore, more freedom. It was brought to the screen by three people with respect for the comic book medium—writer David S. Goyer (a man who has written for comic books), Wesley Snipes (who has been attached to every African-American comic book character being brought to the big screen, from Luke Cage to Black Panther) and Stephen Norrington (who would go on to direct League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and would be attached at various times to the Ghost Rider film and The Crow reboot). These men would set the template of how to make a successful comic book film.

That template boiled down to being respectful to the source material while making the best film you can. Changes to the comic book source material shouldn’t be done arbitrarily, but to make the best cinematic presentation possible.

Case in point, the film changes Blade’s origin. His mother is still bitten by a vampire, but before she gives birth. But the bite now turns Blade into what is called a “Daywalker,” someone with all the powers and weaknesses of a vampire yet able to walk in the day time. This change adds more weight and pathos to the character, while making him more of a threat to the vampires.

Another part of the template is that Goyer and Norrington left the campiness at home. Blade is a serious work. Wesley Snipes consistently plays Blade as a grim, driven hunter, never with a wink of his eye towards the audience that he thinks he’s above the material.  There are oodles of cyberpunk style layered on, but never to the point of becoming a joke. The project was approached not as adapting kiddie fare; it was approached as a horror concept and treated duly respectfully. And it was released with an R rating, to say that it definitely wasn’t kid’s stuff.

This first Blade almost tripled its budget, which set up the inevitable sequel, Blade II.

Goyer stayed on to write, but the directorial reins were handed over to a pre-Hellboy Guillermo del Toro. This film sent Blade to Europe in search of a hybrid band of vampire called Reavers, so advanced they hunt normal vampires. Blade is forced to team with a group of vampire mercenaries, one played by future Hellboy Ron Perlman, to eradicate the threat to humans and vampires alike.

Blade II made the most money of the series, and a franchise was born. But the future of the franchise was placed in jeopardy with the next sequel—Blade: Trinity.

David S. Goyer took over the directing duties in addition to his writing job this time around, and decided the Blade franchise needed to branch out. Therefore, he added two new vampire hunters to help Blade out: one from the comics in the form of Ryan “Mr. Comic Book Film” Reynolds’  Hannibal King and one original creation in Jessica Biel’s Abigail Whistler.  The idea was to allow Blade: Trinity to showcase these characters so audiences would fall in love with them and they could spin them off into their own film franchise or in place of the Blade franchise if Snipes retired the role.

There were a number of problems with this. First off, they forgot to ask Snipes what he thought of this. Well, since he was a producer on the film, they probably did ask him. They probably just ignored what problems he had with the idea. Snipes felt Blade didn’t need another partner, he had Whistler (played by Kris Kristofferson in the first two films and written as Abigail’s father in this one) and that was fine. Snipes eventually sued New Line Cinema and Goyer, stating he hadn’t been paid what he was owed and that his screen time was deliberately reduced at the expense of giving the spin off characters more screen time, which hampered the quality of the film.

He might have had a point there, because the film is the weakest of the three. While I didn’t find it as horrible as some critics, it definitely seemed out of place in style and tone with the two previous Blade films. It attempted to ape the style of the other films, but came off as too glossy and less gritty than the others. The new characters did defuse the focus quite a bit, and while in this film they finally pit Blade against Dracula, the villain is mostly relegated to a background role, making for a wasted opportunity.

Despite the hard feelings, Snipes has repeatedly stated he would like there to be a Blade 4. But the actor’s imprisonment for tax evasion, him being over 50 when released in 2013, and Marvel gaining the rights back from New Line means that any new Blade film will probably be a reboot and most likely not feature Snipes.

Next time, we look at how the new era of comic book films opened the doors for more independent comic books to hit the big screen.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll talk about how far DC Comics book movies fell during the 1990s.

Films adapted from DC Comics once ruled the box office, and they had an almost 20 year reign at that. They had the Superman franchise, which ran from the late 1970s to the 1980s, and when that franchise petered out, they had the Batman series to take its place.

But by 1997, the Bat-franchise was on its way out. The disastrous Batman and Robin opened in June of that year, effectively killing that franchise dead. DC was ripe for another franchise to be adapted from its pages. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t happen.

This is not to say that they didn’t try. That same year, they cast one of the world’s most beloved celebrities in a film based on a character from the Superman mythos. That film was Steel.

Steel the comic book character spun out of the Death of Superman storyline. He was an African-American scientist named John Henry Irons who, disgusted by the fact that his work was used to create weapons of mass destruction, faked his own death to live life as a construction worker in Metropolis.  One day, while trying to rescue a co-worker, Irons fell off of a skyscraper he was working on. He was saved by Superman and when asked what Irons could do to repay him, the Man of Steel answered, “Live a life worth saving.”

When the comic book Superman was killed by Doomsday, Irons, inspired by the hero’s words and example, decided to construct a suit of armor and carry out his fight for justice as Steel.

The film was helmed by Kenneth Johnson, a positive sign. He was the man responsible for the Incredible Hulk TV series, one of the best comic book adaptations in any media. He also created such comic-friendly TV series as Six-Million Dollar Man and V, so his involvement was a cause for optimism.

That optimism didn’t last.

Shaquille O’Neal is one of the best basketball players to ever play the game. He is a funny and witty man in interviews. And all indications show he is one of the biggest (in every sense of the word) fans of Superman, if not comic books, the world has ever seen. What he is not is one of the best actors the world has ever seen. Look at this clip and tell me if he seems awkward to you:

If you are going to remove the connection to Superman, which the makers of this film pretty much had to do considering that it would be too much to deal with in a first film, you are going to lose a lot of depth and gravitas from the character. You’re going to need an actor who could bring that weight to the role. Shaq just wasn’t it.

While Steel was a disappointment, it was like Citizen Kane compared to what Warner Brothers did to Catwoman in 2004.

A Catwoman film had been in the works since the character appeared in 1992’s Batman Returns, but by the time the character got a film of her own, it bore only a passing connection to the one played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the earlier film. The producers probably thought that this would be a good idea—it would be a year before Christopher Nolan would make the Bat-franchise into anything you’d want to be associated with. But the new direction quite possibly was worse than even Batman and Robin.

Catwoman was now Patience Phillips played by Halle Berry. Now, on paper, this looks like good casting. Berry was fresh off her Oscar win for Monster’s Ball and definitely would look good in a leather catsuit. Too bad the film she was cast in was an example of style over substance with style being nothing to write home about in the first place.

Berry’s Catwoman is more feral than Pfeiffer’s to the point of parody. Not only is she more acrobatic and lands on her feet every time, but she also scarfs down fish-related food products and hisses at dogs on the street.Director Pitof shoots the film with more of concern devoted to making the picture look pretty than making the film work. After the attack that turns Berry into Catwoman, Patience comes into work wearing the same clothes she wore the day before. The potentially awkward situation is mitigated by the fact that EVERYONE in the office is WEARING THE SAME CLOTHES AS THE DAY BEFORE!

Topping that off, you have hammy over acting and improbable plot complications that would kill a film in and of itself. Catwoman is often used as an example of the worst that comic book films have to offer. That’s unfair. It’s the worst that all films have to offer.

Next week, Marvel takes advantage of DC’s downturn to gain cinematic dominance—with a supporting character from the company’s supernatural past.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll talk about Image Comics and their sole represented film, Spawn.

The 1990’s were the era of the speculator in comics, where sales were at an all-time high due to investors buying numerous copies of particular comics books with the hopes that they would increase in value as the years went by. This was spurred on by the comic book companies themselves, who added special covers—be they metallic, die-cut, or just plain variant—to entice these wanton speculators in.

The 1990s were also the era of the superstar artist. Certain artists would become so popular that having them draw a particular comic book would be like printing money. These artists became the rock stars of the comic book world, and were treated—and behaved—accordingly.

These two characteristics were not mutually exclusive. In fact, they fed into each other in a symbiotic relationship. If a hot artist would be able to sell hundreds of thousands of copies on his own, put a variant cover on the comic that artist worked on and it could sell millions of copies. And selling that many copies would increase the cache of the artist which would mean he would attract more customers on his own.  Which means variant covers or new number one featuring the artist’s artwork would sell even more and so on.

It is into this atmosphere that Image Comics was born. It started when seven of Marvel Comics hottest artists—Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Rob Liefeld and Jim Valentino—came to Marvel president Terry Stewart and demanded creative control and ownership (therefore a bigger piece of the profit pie) for their work or else they would walk.

These artists were comparatively well paid for the time, yet were making a pittance of what their work was bringing into Marvel’s coffers. However, their demands were impossible to be met by Stewart, who believed creators are interchangeable and the true value lied in the characters they worked on.  The group of seven knew they would be refused and had a plan in motion to start their own company. Each creator would own whatever characters they created for this new company, which they called Image.

Image was an immediate success as the fans followed the new superstars to their new home in droves. And one of the breakout hits of the company was Todd McFarlane’s contribution—Spawn.

Spawn probably wouldn’t have existed and Image wouldn’t have been as popular as it was if Todd McFarlane was easily discouraged. There was an exhibit dedicated to Todd McFarlane at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York City several years ago, and one of the display cases featured hundreds of rejection letters McFarlane received before he finally broke in to comics.

McFarlane started in comics doing fill-in work on titles such as Coyote, All-Star Squadron, G.I.Joe and Daredevil before landing his first full time assignment in Infinity Inc.. From there, high profile works at DC Comics such as Detective Comics and the crossover Invasion! led to work at Marvel on Incredible Hulk and Amazing Spider-Man. It was on those titles where McFarlane became a superstar and allowed him the freedom to create Spawn.

Spawn was a character that McFarlane created as a young child, one he would revisit periodically as time went by. The character was Al Simmons, a CIA agent with skill at performing Black Ops. After he is killed on a mission by one of his team, Simmons goes to Hell. There, he is offered a deal. He can return to Earth to see his wife Wanda again if he acts as a Hellspawn, a soldier with limited demonic powers who helps populate Hell’s army with the souls of the people he kills.  However, this deal had a catch as Simmons returns years after his death to see his wife remarried to his best friend Terry and that they have a daughter together.

It’s easy to see why Spawn resonated with 1990’s fans. The classic elements of the anti-hero are woven in to the character’s very design (a man returning from Hell itself to try and do good). On top of that, the character has a succinct and powerful weakness (a finite power supply) and a load of angst in his life (a family that he can never be reunited with). This is characterization 101, and made Spawn an obvious choice to be the first Image character adapted to the big screen in 1997.

The film is a rather faithful adaptation of the comic book, considering Simmons’ killer being changed out of necessity (the character that killed Simmons in the comic, a man named Chapel, is owned by another Image partner, Rob Liefeld), Terry’s skin color being changed from black to white to appeal to the latter demographic, and more emphasis put on the action part of the mythos than the supernatural.

The film was a moderate success, almost doubling its production budget. Talk of a sequel began almost immediately, but it took so long in development that the sequel talk morphed into talk of a reboot. Mcfarlane has pledged that there will be another Spawn film, even if he has to produce it himself.  But that film is still a longtime in coming.

Next week, we look at how DC Comics film began their decline that lasts to this very day.